StairMed's penetrating BCI trial at Huashan reaches 18 cumulative implants

By Inside BCI · July 20, 2026

Three months after a Shanghai neurosurgeon slid a coin-sized penetrating brain implant into his motor cortex, a Chinese man who had spent the previous five or six years mostly in bed sat in front of a CCTV News camera at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and drove a wheelchair through a demonstration room with his thoughts. He is quadriplegic from an accident. He did not press a joystick. He then took a one-minute cursor-click accuracy test against the reporter interviewing him. The reporter, using a finger, scored 4.9 bits per second. The patient, using his brain, scored 6.19. On camera, he said the implant had given him something he had not felt in years: “After this BCI implant, I’m much happier and more open than before. For the last five or six years, I was stuck in my own world, feeling darkness, life had no meaning. Now I feel I’ve found direction in life again.” The implant is a StairMed WRS02, the ultra-flexible electrode array developed at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology (CEBSIT) by neurotechnology researcher Xue Li (李雪) and biomedical engineer Zhao Zhengtuo (赵郑拓), and it is now inside eighteen brains.

StairMed’s disclosure to CCTV News on 20 July 2026, republished by Yangcheng Evening News, is the first confirmed cumulative-patient update on the trial since MassDevice reported three implants completed by end-of-2025. It brings the total number of penetrating invasive brain-computer interface implants inside human motor cortex in China to a level that begins to approach Western academic cohorts. It is worth being precise about what the eighteen is and is not, and about how the Shanghai team is now competing with three other Shanghai firms operating at the same hospital.

What the update actually reports

The trial is an investigator-initiated study run jointly by Shanghai StairMed Technology (上海阶梯医疗科技有限公司), the Institute of Neuroscience at CAS’s CEBSIT, and the Department of Neurosurgery at Huashan Hospital, Fudan University. The first implant took place on 25 March 2025 in a Chinese man in his fifties who had lost all four limbs thirteen years earlier in a high-voltage electrical accident. Twenty to twenty-two days post-op, the first patient was playing chess and racing games with his implant. Xinhua covered the case in June 2025, Global Times covered the trial in May 2025, and CGTN’s initial June 2025 write-up put StairMed’s implant module dimensions on the record: twenty-six millimetres in diameter, less than six millimetres thick, inserted through a three-to-five-millimetre cranial puncture with the sensor sitting five to eight millimetres deep into motor cortex. The electrodes themselves are ultra-flexible micro-nano polyimide threads roughly one micrometre thick, made at cross-sections orders of magnitude smaller than a human hair, and connected through a proprietary V0.2 surgical robot to a 256-channel wireless recording head-stage the company calls WRS02.

The 20 July on-camera figure is 18 cumulative implants. StairMed disclosed the number through Li Xue directly to the CCTV News reporter at the WAIC forum. It is a company-disclosed figure, not an audited registry disclosure and not from a peer-reviewed dataset, and Inside BCI is attributing it accordingly. StairMed’s public plan, reported by Xinhua and Global Times through 2025 and by MassDevice in April 2026, is to enrol approximately forty patients in a formal registration trial from mid-2026, complete registration clinical work in 2027, and target commercial launch in 2028. The 18 sits between the three-implant figure MassDevice reported in April 2026 and the forty-patient trial target, and the ramp rate implies StairMed is running roughly one implant per fortnight through the second and third quarters of 2026.

Li Xue’s own framing of what the 6.19 bits per second figure means is worth quoting precisely: “The best state subjects generally reach is 6-plus. At that level, they can already use the computer very smoothly, essentially satisfying needs like web browsing, gaming, even work.” Inside BCI is not offering a leaderboard comparison to Neuralink’s Noland Arbaugh or the BrainGate consortium cohort on this piece because the task protocols behind the various BPS reports have not been matched. What is directly comparable in the same CCTV segment is that the reporter, with an intact index finger and a mouse, scored 4.9. The patient, with a brain implant, scored 6.19. That is the on-camera data point.

Who StairMed is

The company was incorporated in August 2021 in Shanghai. Xue Li and Zhao Zhengtuo are the two co-founders, both researchers at CEBSIT’s Institute of Neuroscience, the CAS institute that has produced most of China’s recent invasive BCI academic output. Their scientific lineage traces to the Rice University lab of Chong Xie, where Zhao co-authored the foundational 2017 Science Advances paper on ultraflexible nanoelectronic probes that formed reliable, glial-scar-free neural integration. The follow-on work through 2018 (Advanced Science), 2019 (Journal of Neural Engineering), 2023 (Nature Biomedical Engineering, months-long high-density recording of thousands of neurons in rodents), and 2024 (Nature Communications, intravascular delivery of the ultraflexible array for cortical spike recording) is the pre-clinical foundation on which the human trial was built. The most recent human-cortex validation was published on 13 April 2026 in Nature Communications by Wu, Yan, Kong and colleagues (PMID 41974677), reporting 719 single units recorded across 11 patients at Huashan and Xijing Hospitals during intraoperative deep brain stimulation surgery. That paper is the acute-recording validation of the electrode platform, not the chronic 18-patient trial cohort, and the two should not be conflated.

StairMed’s capital position is closer to the frontier than most Chinese medtech companies. The company closed a strategic financing round of approximately RMB 500 million (about US$72.8 million) on 2 April 2026, led by Alibaba, with participation from Tencent, Fountainbridge Capital, OrbiMed, Oriza Seed, Qiming Venture Partners, Lilly Asia Ventures, Source Code Capital, and SDIC Unity Capital. The company’s cumulative twelve-month raise is around RMB 1.1 billion (about US$160 million). A February 2025 round of RMB 350 million (US$48 million) was led by Qiming, OrbiMed and Lilly Asia Ventures; an earlier Series A in late 2023 pulled in “hundreds of millions of yuan” from Aobo Capital and Yuanhe Origin. Alibaba as the lead investor in the April 2026 round is the specific new signal. Tencent, which had been an existing shareholder from earlier rounds, described itself in the announcement as a “core industrial investor.” StairMed also says it has received NMPA Green Channel status for innovative medical devices; the company’s claim is that it is the only invasive BCI in China with that designation, which Inside BCI is attributing to StairMed rather than independently verifying against NeuCyber and Neuracle’s own regulatory positions.

Where the eighteen sit in the Shanghai BCI cluster

The Huashan Hospital connection is not exclusive to StairMed. As of 30 June 2025, the Shanghai municipal government’s own English-language announcement identified three local BCI firms operating in-hospital partnerships with Huashan: Neuracle, NeuroXess, and StairMed. Since then, each of those three has hit a different regulatory and commercial mark. Neuracle became the first Chinese invasive BCI to receive NMPA Class III commercial approval on 13 March 2026, with the first commercial implant on 13 July 2026 at Huashan itself, as Inside BCI covered on 18 July. NeuroXess reached first-in-human status in April 2025 with a 256-channel fully implantable flexible electrode in an epilepsy patient and is now scaling a factory in Nanchang toward 10,000 sets per year, per The Wire China’s 19 July 2026 industrial-playbook feature. StairMed has now confirmed 18 chronic implants and is running toward the mid-2026 registration trial. The three companies use materially different device architectures: Neuracle NEO sits epidurally on the dura mater surface without penetrating cortical tissue; NeuroXess and StairMed both use penetrating flexible electrode arrays, but through different insertion, packaging, and channel-count architectures.

The strategic frame for the eighteen, then, is not that StairMed is beating anyone. Neuracle already has commercial approval and the first prescription. NeuroXess already has a factory. What StairMed has is the largest chronic penetrating cohort at Huashan, at a device pitch (256 channels, single-neuron spike resolution) that puts it in the same category the Western commercial cohort is targeting. Chinese state media consistently frame the trial as China’s first prospective clinical trial of a penetrating invasive BCI. That framing is defensible only with the “penetrating” qualifier attached. Neuracle NEO’s first-in-human was October 2023 at Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, eighteen months before StairMed’s, but Neuracle NEO’s device is epidural. The Chinese-language regulatory and industry vocabulary distinguishes 侵入式 (penetrating) from 半侵入式 (semi-invasive / epidural) at the level of clinical trial classification. Inside BCI is preserving that distinction here.

What to watch

Watch StairMed’s move from investigator-initiated trial to formal registration trial. The mid-2026 registration cohort of approximately forty patients is the specific regulatory pathway the company is on. Whether the enrolment actually starts by the end of Q3 2026, and whether the site network expands beyond Huashan into Xijing (where the Nature Communications 2026 acute-recording paper’s second cohort was based) or into other CEBSIT-affiliated hospitals, is the operational-scaling signal. StairMed’s stated 2028 commercial launch target depends on registration trial completion in 2027, which depends on enrolment starting in earnest now.

Watch how Alibaba’s April 2026 lead position plays out. Chinese enterprise investment in medical device manufacturers is rarely purely financial. Alibaba’s Damo Academy has a public interest in embodied AI and neural interfaces, and Tencent’s core-industrial-investor framing on the same round suggests the two large Chinese platforms are placing side-by-side bets on StairMed as their invasive BCI infrastructure partner. If the same two names appear on NeuroXess’s next round or on a fresh Neuracle post-IPO strategic investment, the pattern generalises. If they stay concentrated on StairMed, the company gains an outsized share of the Chinese platform-scale distribution advantage.

Watch how the three Shanghai firms at Huashan differentiate as they scale. Neuracle NEO is now on the commercial side of the wall. NeuroXess is scaling manufacturing. StairMed is running the largest chronic penetrating cohort. The natural next data points are whether Neuracle sees a second commercial implant this month, whether NeuroXess’s Nanchang factory reaches its 10,000-sets-per-year run rate on schedule, and whether StairMed’s registration trial produces the first Chinese peer-reviewed chronic penetrating BCI safety paper. Each of the three is on a different clock.

Watch how the CCTV News on-camera 6.19 bits per second figure gets received by the international academic community. That number, from a single one-minute session, is not directly comparable to task-matched Western BCI cursor performance in peer-reviewed literature. It is a marketing figure, and Xue Li presented it as such. Whether StairMed publishes matched-protocol chronic BPS data in a peer-reviewed paper before the mid-2026 registration trial completes is the specific signal that would move the metric from marketing to benchmark.

Sources

news StairMed 阶梯医疗 Zhao-Zhengtuo Xue-Li CEBSIT Huashan-Hospital Fudan-University penetrating-invasive-BCI ultra-flexible-electrode WRS02 WAIC-2026 Shanghai-BCI-cluster NeuroXess Neuracle-NEO Alibaba Tencent Industrial-Builder-posture

What the update actually reports

Who StairMed is

Where the eighteen sit in the Shanghai BCI cluster

What to watch

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